It’s Time to Let Edward Snowden Come Home…

The President and others have praised the U.S.A. Freedom Act, but haven’t mention the blindingly obvious fact that without Edward Snowden the law wouldn’t exist.

Now that Congress has passed, and President Obama has signed, the U.S.A. Freedom Act, which places some limits on the domestic-surveillance powers of the National Security Agency, there’s still unfinished business to deal with.

The new legislation, while it is commendable as far as it goes, contains some obvious shortcomings. Barring the N.S.A. from collecting and holding the phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans was a necessary step, but it won’t make much difference if the result is that the phone companies hold on to the data and secret courts enable the N.S.A. to access it virtually at will. The legislation leaves on the books a law from 1986 that allows the government to read any e-mail that is more than six months old, and it doesn’t change Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which the N.S.A. has used to justify collecting not just metadata, such as phone records, but the actual contents of communications, such as e-mails and online chats.

Another matter still at hand is the fate of Edward Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who has been languishing in Vladimir Putin’s Russia for almost two years. In a statement that President Obama issued shortly before signing the new law, he said, “For the past eighteen months, I have called for reforms that better safeguard the privacy and civil liberties of the American people while ensuring our national security officials retain tools important to keeping Americans safe … enactment of this legislation will strengthen civil liberty safeguards and provide greater public confidence in these programs.” Nowhere did the President or the new law’s sponsors on Capitol Hill state the blindingly obvious: that if it hadn’t been for Snowden’s leaks, the intelligence agencies’ excesses would never have come to light, the U.S.A. Freedom Act wouldn’t exist, and the N.S.A. would still be merrily sweeping up phone records and analyzing them as it saw fit. (My colleague Mattathias Schwartz argued last week that Snowden shouldn’t have been necessary.)

Instead of thanking Snowden for his public service and inviting him to come home, the U.S. government is still seeking to arrest him and try him on charges that carry long prison sentences. “The fact is that Mr. Snowden committed very serious crimes,” the White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Monday. “The U.S. government and the Department of Justice believe that he should face them.”

In a criminal complaint that it filed on June 14, 2013, the Justice Department accused Snowden of stealing government property, communicating national-defense information without authorization, and revealing classified information. The last two charges were filed under the 1917 Espionage Act, which seemed to suggest that the U.S. government regards Snowden as a spy. That is absurd. Despite suggestions in some quarters, back in 2013, that Snowden might be passing along some of America’s secrets to the intelligence agencies of China or Russia, there is no evidence that this happened.

Rather than transmitting information to foreign powers, Snowden handed over his electronic stash of documents to reporters from the Guardian and the Washington Post, with the stipulation that they treat its contents sensitively and carefully. Although the leak led to some sensational stories—Michael Morell, a top C.I.A. official, called it “the most serious compromise of classified information in the history of the U.S. intelligence community”—the journalists largely adhered to Snowden’s stipulation.

The news stories brought to light many details about domestic surveillance, such as the bulk collection of phone records and the PRISM program, which enabled the N.S.A. to retrieve users’ e-mails and search histories from Internet companies such as Google and Facebook. Another story revealed that the N.S.A.’s own internal auditor had concluded that the agency had breached its own privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times a year since 2008. But despite some embarrassing details about overseas operations (such as the fact that the United States had tapped the phone calls of world leaders, including Germany’s Angela Merkel), the stories based on the Snowden leaks didn’t reveal much about specific U.S. intelligence operations around the world. Nor did they compromise individual intelligence agents.

As Snowden intended, the primary impact of the leaks was on political debate inside the United States. Based partly on the information that Snowden released, a federal judge, Richard J. Leon, ruled in December, 2013, that the N.S.A. had violated the Constitution, calling the bulk-data-collection program “almost Orwellian.” That same month, a panel of experts appointed by Obama issued a report calling for some restrictions on the powers of the FISA court and for an end to the N.S.A.’s bulk-data-collection program, which, the panel said, “creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty.” Led by the Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, of Vermont, and the G.O.P. Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, of Wisconsin, a bipartisan effort emerged to rein in the N.S.A., which Sensenbrenner, one of the original authors of Patriot Act, accused of misusing and overstepping the powers that Congress had granted to it. The newly passed legislation is an amended version of the original bill that Leahy and Sensenbrenner put forward in the fall of 2013.

To repeat, none of this would have happened without Snowden’s intervention. Doubtless, the intelligence agencies are pressing the White House to stick to its hard line about prosecuting him, on the grounds that dropping the charges, or making some sort of plea bargain, would encourage other leakers. But that is a self-serving argument, and it doesn’t stand up to inspection. In a free society, we want whistle-blowers who have persuasive evidence that great wrongs are being carried out to come forward and tell us about them. The President has argued in the past that Snowden could have taken his concerns to his seniors, and that he would have been protected by an executive order affording protections to whistle-blowers in the intelligence agencies. The notion is risible. As the Times editorial board pointed out last year, the executive order that Obama was referring to didn’t even apply to government contractors like Snowden.

Americans understand that they live in a world that contains people and organizations intent on doing harm to the United States, and they are willing to grant the federal government some intrusive powers in order to protect the country and its citizenry. But they also want reassurance that the authorities aren’t monitoring the every move and communication of ordinary people who have nothing to do with terrorism or any other form of wrongdoing. In the words of the high-level panel of experts appointed by Obama, “Free nations must protect themselves, and nations that protect themselves must remain free.”

After 9/11, for a variety of reasons, some of them eminently understandable, the trade-off between security and liberty tipped too far in the direction of intrusion and authoritarianism. Historians will record that Snowden’s leaks helped, at least somewhat, to right the balance. At great risk to himself, he stood up to the immensely powerful system for which he worked, and cried foul. Rather than seeking to incarcerate Snowden for decades, which was the fate that met Chelsea Manning, the WikiLeaks whistle-blower, the U.S. government ought to be seeking some sort of deal with his lawyers that would allow him to return home and carry on with his life.
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There is NO EVIDENCE that the Bible is from or inspired by a God, or that either of these two man-made biblical scriptures -- foundational to Christianism -- is true: Genesis 1:1 "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." John 3:16: "For God so loved the world that He gave is only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." NONE.

Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so. ~Robert Ingersoll

All religion is a foolish answer to a foolish question. ~Thomas Shelby

The strongly religious fear our capacity for moral reasoning that does not require a magical, invisible deity. They fear our ability to be ethical without the threat of hell or the reward of heaven. They fear that our allegiance is not to this or that country, or this or that prophet, or this or that guru, but to humanity as a whole. ~Phil Zuckerman

The idea that God could only forgive our sins by having his son tortured to death as a scapegoat is surely, from an objective point of view, a deeply unpleasant idea. If God wanted to forgive us our sins, why didn’t he just forgive them? Why did he have to have his son tortured? ~Richard Dawkins

Small is beautiful, when small is skilled and dedicated. ~Gene Logsdon

All religions are lies and scams, and all believers are victims. ~David Silverman

We [atheists] have no martyrs, we have no saints. ~Christopher Hitchens

Morality is doing right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right. ~H L Mencken

I've observed that people tend to live at one of two extremes in the spectrum of life: those who live on the edge, and those who avoid the edge. Those who live on the edge are hanging out in the most dangerous and unstable places — yet they're also often the most powerful agents of change, because the edge is where change is happening; away from the edge, things are naturally unchanging. ~Thom Hartmann

Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion. ~Jon Stewart

My 12th year was my most Christian and most boring year in my life. ~Chuck Berry

Come on. You just can’t come up with anything more ridiculous than someone who honestly thinks that all human woes stem from an incident in which a talking snake accosted a naked woman in a primeval garden and talked her into eating a piece of fruit. ~Keith Parsons

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco

Christians don’t need to be born again, they need to grow up. ~John Shelby Spong

Life is not a problem to be solved, nor a question to be answered. Life is a mystery to be experienced. ~Alan Watts

Society is like a stew: If you don't stir it up every now and then, the scum rises to the top.~Edward Abbey

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. ~Buckminster Fuller

How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one. ~ Richard Dawkins

I’m not saying there isn’t a god, but there isn’t a god who cares about people. And who wants a god who doesn’t give a shit? ~Robert Munsch

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. ~Arthur C. Clarke

Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; Give him a religion, and he'll starve to death
while praying for a fish. ~ Anon

When you understand why you dismiss all the other gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. ~ Stephen Roberts

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning. ~ Joseph Campbell

The only true definition of an atheist: a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in God or gods. ~Oxford English Dictionary

You have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

Faith is just another word for gullibility.

I sang as one / Who on a tilting deck sings / To keep men's courage up, though the wave hangs / That shall cut off their sun. ~C. Day Lewis

Resilience Tools (Basic)

Freethought/Stoics

Religion Divides

The Wikipedia of Christian Terrorism (Link)

Books of the Freethinkers Bible

What is a fact beyond all doubt is that we share an ancestor with every other species of animal and plant on the planet. We know this because some genes are recognizably the same genes in all living creatures, including animals, plants and bacteria. And, above all, the genetic code itself — the dictionary by which all genes are translated — is the same across all living creatures that have ever been looked at. We are all cousins. Your family tree includes not just obvious cousins like chimpanzees and monkeys but also mice, buffaloes, iguanas, wallabies, snails, dandelions, golden eagles, mushrooms, whales, wombats and bacteria. All are our cousins. Every last one of them. Isn't that a far more wonderful thought than any myth? And the most wonderful thing of all is that we know for certain it is literally true...

The whole world is made of incredibly tiny things, much too small to be visible to the naked eye — and yet none of the myths or so-called holy books that some people, even now, think were given to us by an all-knowing god, mentions them at all! In fact, when you look at those myths and stories, you can see that they don't contain any of the knowledge that science has patiently worked out. They don't tell us how big or how old the universe is; they don't tell us how to treat cancer; they don't explain gravity or the internal combustion engine; they don't tell us about germs, or anesthetics. In fact, unsurprisingly, the stories in holy books don't contain any more information about the world than was known to the primitive peoples who first started telling them! If these 'holy books' really were written, or dictated, or inspired, by all-knowing gods, don't you think it's odd that those gods said nothing about any of these important and useful things? -Richard Dawkins

Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down. I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of responsibility. Life, as it is, does not frighten me, since I have made my peace with the universe as I find it, and bow to its laws… It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish. I feel no need for such.

I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was a part before the sun rolled into shape and burst forth in the glory of change. I was, when the earth was hurled out from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to Father Sun, and still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire, and disintegrated into infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble of space. Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? -Zora Neale Hurston

Democratic Socialism

Socialist Alternative is the organization that spearheaded the campaign to elect Kshama Sawant to Seattle City Council, the first independent socialist elected in a major U.S. city in decades. We are a national organization fighting in our workplaces, communities, and campuses against the exploitation and injustices people face every day. We are community activists fighting against budget cuts in public services; we are activists campaigning for a $15/hour minimum wage and fighting, democratic unions; we are people of all colors speaking out against racism and attacks on immigrants, students organizing against tuition hikes and war, women and men fighting sexism and homophobia.

We believe the Republicans and Democrats are both parties of big business, and we are campaigning to build an independent, alternative party of workers and young people to fight for the interests of the millions, not the millionaires.

We see the global capitalist system as the root cause of the economic crisis, poverty, discrimination, war, and environmental destruction. As capitalism moves deeper into crisis, a new generation of workers and youth must join together to take the top 500 corporations into public ownership under democratic control to end the ruling elites’ global competition for profits and power.

We believe the dictatorships that existed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were perversions of what socialism is really about.

We are for democratic socialism where ordinary people will have control over our daily lives.

An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that deed must be done instead of prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated. ~Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Founder

In the history of the world, the number of times a supernatural anything has been proven true is zero. Every god, ghost, spirit, devil, possession, and miracle ever claimed true is a lie. No exceptions. The number of times an atheistic (godless) argument has been proven wrong by a theistic argument is zero... In contrast, every time a theist-versus-atheist argument has been settled, an atheistic argument has won. This does not mean science is antireligion; it just means (or rather, strongly implies) religion is wrong... I challenge anyone to find any scientifically valid testable proof of anything supernatural, ever. If you can prove it, even once, I'll quit my job. I'm not nervous, as it has never been done in history, because it's ALL a lie. ~David Silverman, President

Local Organic Family Farms

THE SMALL ORGANIC FARM greatly discomforts the corporate/ industrial mind because the small organic farm is one of the most relentlessly subversive forces on the planet. Over centuries both the communist and the capitalist systems have tried to destroy small farms because small farmers are a threat to the consolidation of absolute power.

Thomas Jefferson said he didn’t think we could have democracy unless at least 20% of the population was self-supporting on small farms so they were independent enough to be able to tell an oppressive government to stuff it.

It is very difficult to control people who can create products without purchasing inputs from the system, who can market their products directly thus avoiding the involvement of mercenary middlemen, who can butcher animals and preserve foods without reliance on industrial conglomerates, and who can’t be bullied because they can feed their own faces. ~Eliot Coleman